At a recent talk about ancient astronomy, the lecturer said: ‘You do know that Stonehenge predates the pyramids ... ...’ Afterwards I asked him, ‘Have you visited Newgrange?’ ‘What’s Newgrange?’ he asked. I just let it go, turning a blind eye to his ignorance. It’s just that Newgrange here in Ireland predates Stonehenge by at least 1500 years, and the Pyramids at Giza by over 2000 years. Carbon 14 dating gives Stonehenge a date of 1470 -1800 BC and not older; the initial inner circle could date to 1800 BC but certainly not before that date. Whereas Newgrange has the opposite: carbon 14 dating showed a date of at least 3800 BC, and possibly older still. If you look up the internet you find a considerable number of different dates. I took this from a University web site in the U.S.:-

“One of the most impressive prehistoric monuments in Europe is at Newgrange, in Brugh-na-Boyne, County Meath, in eastern Ireland. It covers an area of one acre, and has an entrance passage that is almost 60 feet (18 m) long. Above the entrance way is a stone box that allows the light from the sun to penetrate to the back of the cairn at sunrise on the winter solstice. It has been dated at about 3,700 BCE; it is one of the oldest structures in the world. According to the most reliable Carbon 14 dates available from archaeology. This makes it more than 1800 years older than the Giza Pyramids in Egypt, and 1,500 years more ancient than Stonehenge.”

Some academic works put forward a different point-of-view. The following is from a book by Laurence Flanagan.:-

“The Celts were not, of course, the first inhabitants of Ireland. At the end of the Ice Age, as the climate became warmer at about 6,000 B.C. - early migrants probably crossed the narrow sea from Scotland to the Antrim coast and gradually moved further south. They lived a primitive existence by hunting in the forests and streams and lakes. Next came the first farmers who used stone implements for felling trees and preparing the soil for grain, kept large quantities of cattle, sheep and pigs, and raised huge stone monuments to their dead like the tombs in the Boyne Valley and on the Lough Crew hills. Perhaps by 2,000 B.C. a new group of settlers had arrived, metal-workers in search of gold and copper, who fashioned the artistic ornaments now in the National Museum in Dublin, the greatest collection of prehistoric gold objects in Western Europe.”

Much the same reaction is encountered when you ask the question, ‘Who do you think built Newgrange?’
‘Well it predates the Celts”.
That’s helpful! ‘But who were they and why did they build Newgrange?’
‘As a burial site,’ is the usual reply.
‘Have you visited the site?’
‘No. but I have read about it. It’s a passage tomb.’
I am always amazed at this definitive answer, and this is not from just anyone. This is the answer from academics that have enough degrees in Anthropology and Archaeology to sink the Titanic! ‘So they put bodies in them?’ one asks.
‘Oh yes; that is why they were built.’
I am lost for an answer as to why most of the academic fraternity that I have spoken to view Newgrange with preconceived and definitive ideas and not with exploring open minds. It is not my intention to upset the academic fraternity with this article, but they have their opinion and I have mine; it’s a free country.
I am of average height, 5’ 4”, and I would not consider myself over weight, but to be able to squeeze into the inner chamber at Newgrange I had to duck down and turn my body sideways in order to get past part of the passage. I don’t think a body could be carried into the chamber; it’s too awkward.
Regardless of how old Newgrange is, or who built it, the ordinary Irish person would agree that its purpose is to show the exact moment of the winter solstice. We have seen it on the front page of our newspaper and on national television. There is even a lottery system run by OPW1, for those wishing to be present in the chamber at the moment of the sunrise on the 21st December each year. The inner chamber can accommodate about eight people.

But none of the academics will shift from that first idea that Newgrange was built as a passage tomb. The passage at the end could be said to have a slightly cruciform shape, in the north end of which there is a large stone bowl. This stone bowl is unusual in having two scalloped marks on its surface. Missing from the chambers today are the many large round stone balls which were found in the chambers. It is possible that the bowl and stone balls were used together for the purpose of producing steam in the central chamber. This would highlight the sun beam as it entered the chamber and create a dramatic effect.
There is much decoration of the stones forming both side-chambers, or alcoves, and it is worth noting that the roof stone of the east chamber was decorated before being put into position. The most famous of all the decorations is on the eastern wall of the end chamber. It is the triple spiral and it typifies the unique art style found at Newgrange. This triple spiral is also to be found on the kerbstone immediately outside the entrance within a more complex pattern. As one looks at the decoration on the outside kerbstone, it is noticeable that the spirals to the left of the vertical line decrease in a clockwise direction, while those to the right of the line increase in a clockwise direction. While this decoration has been interpreted in many ways, the most prominent feature is the reversal of the direction of the spiral movement. Spiral patterns are everywhere in nature, look at the top of a baby’s head, look at the flowers and leaves in the garden as they bloom, the galaxies, shells of snails, an embryo, to mention but a few.
The roof of the central chamber rises to a height of about 18 feet and is composed of large slabs of stone laid one on top of the other. It is the finest example of the technique of ‘corbelling’ in Europe and possibly the world. It roofs the oldest enclosed free-standing chamber in the world. After 5000 years it is still weather proof; it doesn’t leak!! The chamber is dark and would be even darker if the entrance were closed as apparently designed – the large undecorated slab found directly outside the passage to the right as you face the entrance was probably for this purpose. Above the entrance to the passage, there is a space the width of the entrance, which is roofed by a decorated stone. This space was only discovered in the excavation by Prof. O'Kelly and is referred to as the roofbox. So who were these people where did they come from? Let us imagine that we are the early settlers to Ireland and that the huge sheet of ice that covered part of the country has melted. Trees have grown in profusion on all of the land.

I have seen this phenomenon. Within two years of ice receding from the glacier at le Bossom in Chamonix, France, trees three feet tall had established themselves and were growing very well. I had never paid much attention to uninterrupted growth before. But it is not too much of a leap of insight to say that the island of Ireland was covered by trees of one kind or another. To farm and exist, some of the land had to be cleared. I think that the early settlers came by boat from the South of the Atlantic; this would make sense because they could go up the river mouths and seek a safe landing area. With their boats at the ready they had a means of escape if threatened.
Then, say there was a bad year in which there was no difference between the winter months and the summer growing season - just like summer 2007! It has happened before and will happen again. They could count the days, of course, but the record would go awry after a number of years because, as we know now, every fourth year we have to add an extra day in order to keep our ‘time-count’ reasonably accurate. Some other, more accurate, means of recording the moment that the sun started to climb higher in the sky was required, so they could start to prepare the ground to grow the food they needed to survive.
Now comes the most difficult part. How did these early geniuses hit upon the idea to build the indicator at Newgrange? How did they select that rising ground just over the bend in the river Boyne (Brugh-na-Boyne)? How much of the ground did they have to clear? What idea fired the imagination of these people into first forming the concept of the alignment of the stones and then building a mound over it? As Bill Darlison has said over and over, in those days everyone understood the movement of the stars in the sky. Martin Brennan came to the same conclusion in 1978.2 There were no watches or clocks to regulate time, as we have today.
Let’s say that it was an accident of a single standing tree that cast a shadow onto the ground and, as the sun rose on its cycle across the sky, let’s say that this person or persons placed a series of markers, possibly stones, at each daily sunrise and sunset shadow. Not only would the distance between the rising shadow and the setting shadow get wider as the sun progressed to its summer solstice, but a clear pattern would emerge that the sun follows a defined path. Having reached its zenith at the summer solstice the sun then retraces that path back to the winter solstice. And then it starts over again, as regular as ‘clock-work’! Is this how the word ‘sacred’ came into being, because this area could not be disturbed for a number of years, until the theory was confirmed?
When the site at Newgrange was surveyed recently with modern equipment it was discovered that the inner level of the passage had been raised, artificially. This is a new discovery as it was assumed that the positioning of the passage was chosen because of the profile of the hill alone. When the profile of the passage is projected in elevation view, the ground rises about a meter and a half (just over five feet) up from the entrance, to the inner chamber. This served to elongate the light from the sun more and bring the land into the elevation plane of the first rays from the rising sun. I would imagine that all of this research had to be tested and confirmed long before any placement of the giant stones that form the passage as we see it today. So how many years of trial and error did this take to get right? You can only do it once a year. In this age and at this stage we have absolutely no idea.
Why did they choose the winter solstice over the summer solstice? I think it was because, as farmers, they needed to know when the days would be getting longer and the safe growing season had started again.
Were the large stones that were used to make the passage aligned now at this stage? The ground had been prepared and raised so that the angle of the rising sun at midwinter day would shine along that piece of ground, at just the right angle. Recent research confirms that some of the carving on these stones was done at this stage, before being put in place. Over the years I have taken close-up pictures of the carving on the stones at different stages with different light, used a flash run at different angles on the same carving, and absolutely no one has been able to say with any certainty what method was used to achieve such accuracy and detail in the stone work. When you do study some of the carvings it looks like the stone was melted, or made pliable in some way. What ever method was used it is now lost.
Having visited Newgrange a number of times, each time I come away with a more enlightened view of the construction and am left more in awe of the builders of this great edifice. I cannot help wondering if the passage was ‘tweaked’ as they built it. To me it suggests that the stones that form the passage were put into place and then angled inwards to create a curtaining effect of the direct full sunlight shining through the roofbox construction, at the entrance. Also if you look at a plan drawing of the passage you can see that there is a slight bend in it. Was this to make the sunlight shine along the different stones as the shaft of sunlight advanced or receded along the passage, highlighting the individual carvings as it progressed?
As we have seen at the beginning of this article, any suggestion that this was a very intelligent race of people will be dismissed by the academics. They will be very quick to point out that there is no evidence of their existence in any area other than the marked stones.
But the Stone Age Irish people were far from savages. We are talking about a highly civilised, cultured, functional people. They belonged to a civilisation that was in some ways eons ahead of our own. That what they considered valuable - namely the instrument for the measurement of the sun - could endure through the centuries to the present day shows an astuteness beyond our comprehension. The fact that these people built an edifice that others could use and continue to use only serves to question the conventional term ‘the dawn of civilization’. It may in fact have been its zenith! And as I have tried to do in this article we can only guess at the circumstances that came to pass and provoke our ancient ancestors into building this cyclical sun measuring device at Newgrange.

I originally intended to use one of the many photographs I have on the front cover of this edition of Oscailt, but in order to get a more accurate picture of the amazing explosion of light I had to use a painting. I built a model of the passage of Newgrange using black cardboard for the standing stones. When I pointed this at the sun and looked through as if my eye was in the position of the back wall, the sunlight broke into brief rainbow rays. In order to make this persist, the sun has to be kept just peeping in, and to photograph this was very difficult, because the direct rays from the sun tended to blind the camera. But when I just dampened the floor part of the model, as soon as the sun rays touched the damp floor, a most amazing light show started. Each time I tried this I got a different result, but each time within a few seconds of the moisture starting to heat in the sunlight, there was a conglomeration of the most spectacular colours I have ever witnessed. The picture that is on the front cover does not do justice to the phenomenon; it is only a feeble attempt at the spectacular explosion of rainbow effects.

P. Spain October 2007

1 OPW. Is the, Office of Public Works, they hold a draw to facility anyone wishing to partake in the lottery to gain access to the inner chamber of Newgrange between the 21st to 23rd December inclusive, at about 8.18a.m. The sunshine penetrates the chamber over the period of three days, this can vary, 2007 is from 22nd to 24th , next year 2008 will start on the 21st.
2The Boyne Valley Vision, by Martin Brennan, published by Dolman Press.